A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as a means of classification. Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by a user of the item. For example, a user discovers a webpage that discusses Indian cooking. The user creates a tag that associates one or more words with the webpage, such as “Indian cooking”.
Thus, tags are not usually part of a formally defined classification scheme. Tags are typically used in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated internet taxonomies for online resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks. Some users use tags as an alternative to the “Bookmark” option provided by the major web browsers.
Typically, an item will have one or more tags associated with it, as part of an automated classification software or system. MyWeb (provided by Yahoo!) and Del.icio.us are popular social bookmarking sites that provide an automated classification system. The system provides links to other items which share that keyword tag, or even to specified collections of tags. This allows for multiple “browseable paths” through the items which can quickly and easily be altered by the collection's administrator, with minimal effort and planning.
Thus far, tagging has been “personal” in that tagging is directed towards end-users that are tagging items for their own use. Tagging is also directed towards other end-users who are able to use others' tags for their use (e.g. searching across all tags). To extend the “Indian cooking” example, the user-created tag is made public by allowing other users to search for websites or webpages that discuss “Indian cooking” and having the URL associated with the “Indian cooking” webpage appear in the search results. However, there is no current mechanism to provide tagging information to owners of websites, in which multiple webpages of a website have been tagged, in an organized and meaningful way.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.